A Brief Note About Grammar

I figure that it’s about time i put up this little disclaimer regarding my relationship with Grammar.  Anyone who’s read any of these blog posts has surely noticed that i write . . unconventionally in a few ways.  First, i don’t capitalize “I” when i’m supposed to.  Or ever, for that matter (outside of a name or title).  Secondly, i have my own (technically incorrect) way of dealing with quotation marks and punctuation.  Certainly there are other grammatical rules that i skirt and ignore, but those two are the most obvious and potentially off-putting.

Let me assure anyone out there who gives a damn that i do not write this way out of laziness, nor out of ignorance.  I’ve taken and passed (with flying colors, i might add) all of the UC and CSU required writing courses for Humanities Majors, and i am most capable of writing in the Strunk and White, grammatically-correct style if and when such a thing is required of me.  The reason why i write the way that i do is because i have very strong opinions in regards to the wheat and the chaff of Traditional Grammar, and since this is my place to be myself, the happy home of my most personal prose, here i write in the way that i think that all English writers should write.  This isn’t a case of l33t contamination, or text-message/instant-messaging style leaking into my views on syntax as much as it is my way to comment subtly about some of the grammatical rules that i think are utter bullshit.

Capitalizing “I” for example.  Why?  Why do we do that?  We don’t capitalize “A” when it’s by itself, do we?  Unless a letter (vowel or no)  is at the front of a proper title, is at the beginning of a sentence, or is being capitalized for emphasis, i see no reason to give it special treatment.  “I” is a letter like any other.  You’ll find no outdated and arbitrary grammatical segregation here.  I get that the rule may be a way of implying that “I” is like a proper name in some sort of weird, Dali-esque, pronoun-centric sense, but fuck that.  If there’s ever to be a real revolution in The World of Grammar, this silliness with the letter “I” will be at the heart of it, guaranteed.

As for punctuation as it relates to quotations, my objection is more superficial.  I think that the way i do it looks cleaner and clearer than the text-book method.  I don’t like crowding a quote with unnecessary commas and capitalization and the like.  I try to let whatever i’ve put in quotes stand strong by itself with a clear meaning, message, or intent, and i feel that slipping extra punctuation in at the end is illogical and muddies-up the sovereignty of the quote.  Sometimes, of course, the traditional rules regarding these kinds of things are absolutely in-flow with how i think it should look/sound.  Thus, at times i punctuate quotes correctly, and at times i do not.  In either case, it is purposeful.

Most of the other grammar mistakes you’ll find here (sentence fragments, run-ons, sentences beginning with prepositions, incorrect use of ellipses’, improper indenting, comma splices, etc) are also intentional, though certainly one or two will slip through unintentionally as well (i’m only a big, hairless monkey, after all . . i’m bound to make some mistakes).  I try to write with an emphasis on how it “sounds” and not on how much red ink my old Lit professors would throw on it, and i think that there is a strong American tradition from some of our most brilliant writers to back me up (not that i’m including myself in such a group in any way).  Just look at how the Vonneguts, the Keseys, and the Palahniuks of the world write if you don’t know what i’m talking about (and really, if you don’t know what i’m talking about then you desperately need to read more).

Anyways, it’s not that anyone’s been giving me crap about my grammar or anything.  I just thought it was high-time for a disclaimer.  Now move along, move along.  There’s nothing to see here.